Top 15 Fastest and Slowest UK Local Authorities for Mobile Broadband in 2025

Network testing firm Ookla, which collects data from consumers via their popular broadband Speedtest.net service, has this morning published a new analysis of mobile 4G and 5G network data performance across UK local authorities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK-wide median mobile download speed rose 15% to 63.03Mbps in 2025, but big gaps remain.

Firstly, it’s important to consider that mobile performance remains a difficult thing to study, not least because end-users are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor and underground), using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment is ever changeable (weather, trees, buildings etc.). All of this can impact signal quality, and that’s before we consider any differences in network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum bands between mast sites etc.

Suffice to say that studies of mobile broadband speed are inherently open to variation, but the top networks often tend to be those with a combination of the best 4G or 5G coverage, a good amount of radio spectrum and the most advanced technologies.

Despite this, Ookla’s latest data found that the number of local authorities where at least 60% of Speedtest samples met or exceeded a 25Mbps (Megabits per second) “good experience” threshold grew from 112 in Q1–Q3 2024 to 126 in Q1–Q3 2025. The share of studied local authorities where a clear majority of tests achieve this performance level has thus risen from about 64% to around 72% in a single year. Not bad.

At the country level, UK mobile broadband performance improved notably between 2024 and 2025. The national median download speed rose from approximately 55.02Mbps to 63.03Mbps, representing a year-on-year increase of around 15%. Median upload speeds also edged higher, going from 7.80Mbps to 8.21Mbps over the same period, while median latency improved marginally from 52ms to 50ms (milliseconds).

Mobile Performance Across the Nations

Mobile outcomes continue to improve unevenly across the UKʼs nations. For example, England remains the “strongest performer“, with median download speeds rising from 57.90Mbps to 65.62Mbps, uploads from 7.80Mbps to 8.21Mbps, and latency improving from 50ms to48 ms.

By comparison, Northern Ireland saw downloads climbing from 39.74Mbps to 45.27Mbps, although it continues to suffer a material latency penalty from the physically longer routes that traffic must traverse before breaking out to the internet. This is reflected in median multiserver latency remaining higher at 66ms.

Wales, meanwhile, improved modestly (downloads up from 38.08Mbps to 40.60Mbps) but remains the slowest nation, and by the widest margin in several years. Scotland presents a mixed picture, with national median download speed slipping from 49.13Mbps to 46.05Mbps despite latency gains, suggesting that while some local authorities improved, others stagnated enough to drag down the national figure.

Mobile Performance by UK Local Authorities

Ookla’s study finds that the mobile performance gap between local authorities “remains stark“. In Q1–Q3 2025, median speeds ranged from a low of just over 10Mbps (Shetland Islands) to just under 100Mbps (Derby). Around 28% of local authorities had fewer than 60% of Speedtest samples meeting the 25Mbps download threshold, “indicating persistently poor connectivity for many in the UK“.

Predictably, those living in urban areas typically benefit from better speeds than those in rural areas, which isn’t surprising as urban areas benefit from a denser network deployment that also enables mobile operators (EE, O2 and Vodafone / Three UK) to make better use of higher frequency mobile bands (i.e. these contain more spectrum frequency for carrying extra data).

The catch being that higher frequency bands aren’t as effective in rural areas because their signals don’t travel as far as lower frequency bands, which in turn don’t contain as much spectrum frequency and thus deliver slower speeds. Suffice to say that the top performing local authorities are often those with a greater proportion of urban areas. Population density clearly correlates strongly with better outcomes below.

Best-performing 15 UK local authorities (Q1-Q3 2025)

Worst-performing 15 UK local authorities (Q1-Q3 2025)

However, some local authorities did stand out as clear improvers. For example, Luton in England saw median download speeds rise from about 51Mbps in 2024 to roughly 74Mbps in 2025, while performance for the slowest 10% of tests improved from around 3.7Mbps to about 6.2Mbps and the share of samples above 25Mbps grew from roughly 64% to about 73%. Aberdeen City in Scotland recorded similar gains, with median speeds climbing from about 72Mbps to nearly 88Mbps and the share of tests above 25Mbps rising from approximately 75% to around 79%.

The share of samples above 25Mbps has also improved modestly across the UK. For the typical authority, this share rose from around 63% in 2024 to roughly 65% in 2025, while the upper quartile moved from about 68% to around 72%.

The positive overall trend observed in national outcomes is largely said by the report to reflect the cumulative impact of several supply-side interventions. One example of this is the £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) project, which has materially extended 4G geographic coverage into underserved areas and is still ongoing (currently tackling some key notspots).

Ookla’s analysis shows that the proportion of mobile users spending most of their time connected to 4G networks improved over the last year, with 4G Availability rising from 96% to 97% at the UK level. The proportion of mobile users spending the majority of their time connected to 3G networks in the UK fell from 4.1% two years ago to 1.1% in 2025, which isn’t surprising given how most of the operators have now switched this off.

The UK also remains one of only a handful of countries in Europe, and globally, where at least three operators have aggressively deployed end-to-end 5G Standalone (SA) technology across a significant footprint (over 12,000 sites by July 2025 according to Ofcom), with one operator (O2) already reporting 70% population coverage and EE touting a near similar level. But clearly the picture is not perfect and some areas do still need further improvement.